My grip tightened around my beer.
“Wait,” he said, squinting slightly. “Aura Clarke?”
Aura’s pen barely paused.
If I hadn’t known her hands, I would have missed it.
Her customer-service smile remained in place, but something underneath it went still. “That’s me.”
Maddox’s eyebrows lifted. His mouth curved slowly and ugly, like he had remembered a joke he should have had the decency to forget.
“Well, damn,” he said. “I thought that was you.”
Her fingers pressed into the order pad. “And yet, somehow, the world keeps spinning. What can I get you?”
A few basketball guys laughed under their breath.
Maddox looked around like he wanted witnesses before he enjoyed himself. “You went to Sutton Ridge, right?”
Aura’s smile did not move. “A long time ago.”
“Not that long.” His eyes dragged across her, and my entire body locked. “You look almost exactly the same.”
Briggs’s knee bumped mine beneath the table.
A warning.
Or a check.
I didn’t know. I didn’t care.
Aura tapped her pen against the pad once. “Drink order, Maddox.”
His grin widened at the sound of his name. “You remember me.”
“I remember a lot of people I would happily never speak to again. Don’t feel special.”
That earned a sharper laugh from the table, but Maddox didn’t flush. He liked it. That was the first thing that made the black thing beneath my ribs begin to move. He liked having her attention even when it came with teeth.
“Still mean as hell,” he said. “Darian always said you had a mouth on you. I guess true colors come through for everyone.”
The name hit her like a hand around the throat.
Aura didn’t flinch. She didn’t drop the pen or step back, but her body changed by degrees. Her shoulders squared. Her chin lifted. Her eyes went blank in that polished way I had once mistaken for indifference before I learned better.
Darian.
I knew the name, but barely. Her ex, the one whose betrayal I had been paying for. Aura had told me he betrayed her. Bliss had told me only that much when she was trying to make me understand Aura without betraying her confidence. An ex, an old wound, a reason Aura did not hand out trust like party favors. I had filed it away under things I was not allowed to ask about and things Aura would cut me for touching, but I didn’t know his name could empty her face like that.
Aura’s smile tightened by a millimeter. “Funny. He always said a lot when no one worth respecting was listening.”She looked Maddox dead in the eye. “You all do. I never forget a voice.”
Maddox laughed. “Yeah, that tracks. You were messy as hell back then.”
Rider’s voice came calmly from beside me. “You ordering something?”
Maddox glanced at him like he had forgotten the rest of us existed, then raised both hands. “Relax. We know each other.”
“No,” Aura said lightly. “We don’t.”
